201517122015547133FFE7254A-6135-C70F-4D49-B81DFFCBFFF2579279238BE42F-E7FC-4101-8D26-BC7ED6A3A8A0510201520112015Michael Schmitt, Jorge Santiago-BlayThis is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Citation

Since more than half a century, Pierre Hippolyte Auguste Jolivet has been the inspiring head of the community of leaf beetle researchers (Fig. 1). He promoted research on Chrysomelidae not only by his nearly 500 publications (see list below), but even more so by his personal input to the international and European symposia on leaf beetles, and especially by the six volumes he co-edited (nos. 274, 316, 338, 339, 340, 445 of the list below) and the three he (co-)authored (nos. 329, 347, 389).

Besides his numerous papers and books on leaf beetles, he has also published on ants, especially ant-plant interactions, on parasites of insects, and on broader topics, such as evolution. In 2005, Pierre initiated the project of a series of volumes, edited by him and the two of us, for which we agreed on the title Research on Chrysomelidae (RoC). The first two volumes appeared with Brill Academic Publishers, the following volumes as special issues of ZooKeys with Pensoft. Now, Pierre has decided to resign from his post as senior editor, and the two of us decided to dedicate the present volume 5 of RoC to honour him.

Pierre Jolivet was born on October 12, 1922, two o’clock in the morning, as he reports in his autobiography (Jolivet 2006, no. 421), in Avranches (Manche department, Lower Normandy). He entered the University of Rennes in 1941, where he studied zoology and botany. He received his bachelor in 1943 with a thesis (Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures) on the biology of the species of Timarcha. These beetles fascinated him through the whole of his scientific life, from his student times through his excursions to Brno (Czech Republic) in the 1950s until one of his most recent papers (no. 485). Finally, his autobiography (no. 421) has the title “Mémoires Entomologiques – Paramémoires d’un timarchophile”.

He received the degree of a “Docteur ès Sciences Naturelles” on April 04, 1954 from the Sorbonne, at that time the only university in Paris. There, he produced a thesis in two volumes (nos. 153, 158) on the hind wing morphology, especially venation of Chrysomelidae. In addition, he has studied and depicted the male copulatory organs of representatives of all subfamilies (except Bruchinae). This publication provides an invaluable treasure of basic morphological knowledge, the more because Pierre Jolivet dissected not only specimens of very common species but also of taxa difficult to obtain for students in Europe, e.g. Australian Sagrinae or American Aulacoscelidinae. He had completed the empirical work at the Musée Royal des Sciences Naturelles of Brussels (Belgium), but was supervised by Pierre Grassé at the Sorbonne. In those days in France, one had to produce two theses to obtain the doctoral degree. Pierre Jolivet handed in his second thesis on the leaf beetles of the Balearic Islands (no. 119), also a fundamental contribution to science, in this case to faunistics. No surprise, a considerable section of this second thesis treats extensively the endemic Timarcha species, Timarchabalearica.

In 1954, Pierre Jolivet undertook the first of his numerous journeys to tropical and exotic areas outside Europe. He travelled through the then Belgian Congo with some detours to Kenya and Uganda, where he studied and collected, of course, leaf beetles. Back in Brussels, he began a series of joint projects with Jean Théodoridès – with whom he had collaborated on leaf beetles before - on gregarines, documented in 15 original papers. These parasites had been recognised as a separate taxon by Pierre Grassé in 1953 in his famous Traité de Zoologie.

With a four months expedition to Iran on behalf of the World Health Organisation began Pierre Jolivet’s “United Nations epoch”. His main duty was the scientific supervision of malaria control activities. He worked as a member of several Malaria Advisor Teams for the UN in many countries, e.g. Taiwan, The Philippines, Ethiopia, Sudan, Algeria, Vietnam, and the Cap Verdes, with teaching activities at universities in New Guinea and in Morocco, until his retirement in 1985. In between, he found his wife Madeleine (Mayon), and they married on March 24, 1962. They have two daughters and one son. She accompanied him on many of his trips, and since 1984 it was a familiar sight to see the couple on the occasion of our regular symposia on Chrysomelidae: 1984 in Hamburg (Germany), 1988 in Vancouver (Canada), 1992 in Beijing (China), 1996 in Florence (Italy), 2000 in Iguassu (Brazil), 2004 in Bonn (Germany), 2008 in Durban (South Africa), and 2010 in Budapest (Hungary). From time to time, the two of them also joined the meetings of the German coleopterists at Beutelsbach (near Stuttgart, Germany). Only the last two of our regular symposia had to take place without Pierre and Madeleine Jolivet – the 8th International Symposium on Chrysomelidae in Daegu (South Korea) in 2012, and the 2nd European Symposium on the Chrysomelidae in York (UK).

Out of Pierre’s countless contributions to the understanding of life and evolution of leaf beetles, there is one to be emphasised especially. Together with Joao Vasconcellos-Neto he discovered, described, and named in 1988 a ring defence behaviour of larvae, which they called “cycloalexy” (nos. 276, 319, 477). This newly coined term has made its way into dictionaries of entomology and will always be connected with the name of its discoverers.

Pierre suffered increasingly from health problems in his legs and, since about 2012, did not dare to travel abroad any longer. This year, he decided to step down from the Board of Editors of Research on Chrysomelidae. He had initiated this series in 2007, after the three of us had successfully co-operated as editors of the 800 pages volume New Developments in the Biology of Chrysomelidae. We shall do our best to make Pierre’s project live on.

We, editors, many authors, and publishers of Research on Chrysomelidae are grateful for Pierre’s permanent intellectual stimulation, his helpful input, and his friendship. We wish Pierre and Madeleine all the best, especially a healthy body and mind, and hope that the present issue of Research on Chrysomelidae as well as the ones to follow will help to keep up the bond between us, the community of leaf beetle enthusiasts, and Pierre Jolivet, our spiritus rector.

281. Ants, Leaf-beetles and Plants. P. 40 in: Annals of the International Symposium of the Evolutionary Ecology of Tropical Herbivores. Campinas State University, Campinas, Brazil.

282. An apterous beetle genus on Compositae: Elytrosphaera. P. 39 in: Annals of the International Symposium of the Evolutionary Ecology of Tropical Herbivores. Campinas State University, Campinas, Brazil.

326. Remarks on the biology and biogeography of Timarcha (Chrysomelidae: Chrysomelinae). Pp. 85–97 in Furth, D.G. (ed.) Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on the Chrysomelidae, Beijing, 1992. Backhuys Publishers, Leiden:

415. Jolivet, P.; Verma, K.K. & Mille, C.: New observations on the biology of Chrysomelidae (Coleoptera) of New Caledonia and description of two new chrysomelid species from the main island. Revue Française d’Entomologie (N.S.) 27(2): 63–72.